


won't you stay awhile?

by paintedpolarbear



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Actually Talking About It As Therapy, Canon Temporary Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Character Getting Better After Having Died, Missing Scene, Sex as Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:42:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: Sara died. Like, died died. Don't worry, she got better. She just wants to get over it and get back to doing her job, and it seems like everyone wants to ask if she's okay. She doesn't want to talk about it, alright?
Relationships: Female Ryder | Sara/Reyes Vidal, Ryder/Reyes Vidal
Kudos: 19





	won't you stay awhile?

"Three down." With an oddly dull sound—they just don’t make them the way they used to, large-scale plastics manufacturing in Heleus being what it is—the pale blue chips clattered to the table, gleaming in the late afternoon light.

The asari on his right huffed in irritation, a nervous tic she’d cultivated deliberately. It hid a smaller, subtler tell, a twitching downturn of her lip, that only those who’d known her for years would notice. Either she didn’t recognize Reyes, or she didn’t think he recognized her. It _had_ been years since they’d run together, back in the Milky Way days—but Amaria T’Uallen had a losing hand and wasn’t going to last much longer. He’d already bet money on it.

“I raise,” she said, tossing another three chips to the sizable pile. The turian on her right, Vel Protus—former Blue Suns, itchy trigger finger, temper like a krogan, knows who makes the sargania liquor and where to get it, stay on his good side as much as humanly possible—glared openly, then chucked his cards faceup with more gusto than was strictly necessary.

"I win," he countered. Reyes didn’t need to actually hear his subvocals to know they were humming with satisfaction.

At that moment, there was a loud disturbance at the other end of the bar: the entrance door had slid open and people were turning their heads to stare at whoever had walked inside.

_And that's my cue_.

“Well, kids, I’ve had fun,” Reyes yawned, laying his own cards out for them to see his winning hand. They bristled at the slanted insult but didn't bother with a rebuttal. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have business to attend to.” He didn’t even bother scooping the chits into his pockets before pushing back his chair and sauntering over to the bar. Amaria and Vel were good for it, and either they’d find him later, or he’d find them.

Ryder—Pathfinder Ryder, the Hawkeye of Heleus, _Sara_ —was a dream in lavender, loitering by the drinks counter in what looked like clean new civvies, sidearm gleaming, making stilted conversation with Umi as she poured something into a stained low-ball glass. In the everlasting grime of Kadara, Ryder always seemed untouched somehow, allowing the ordinary life of the port to ebb and flow around her, while the dirt simply slid away. It was disconcerting, really; an unwelcome reminder that despite the things they had in common, the troubles they'd weathered together, she circulated in a different world entirely, someplace shiny and rosy-cheeked and unaffected by the pleas of the unwashed masses. Reyes found himself wishing he hadn't sold his timeslot at the laundry machine this week to some punk from Ditaeon with a sob story—his last clean shirt was embarrassingly rank.

“You look like you’re waiting for someone,” he said, sliding up to the counter next to her and putting on his best winner’s smile. Truth be told, he was off-put by her unexpected arrival. Ryder wasn’t the type to drop in without warning, not to the outpost or the port, unless someone needed straightening out; he'd kept a tight leash on his people lately, trying to make a good impression, but he supposed the Outcasts' former members might be outgrowing their britches and making trouble where he couldn't see. He would have to expand his network sooner than he'd planned. The Initiative had enough problems on Kadara without "disgruntled employees" adding fuel to the garbage fire.

Ryder nodded up at him but didn't say anything right away. Her hands around the glass were tense, and he had to resist the urge to pry her fingers away and interlace them with his own. Instead he asked Umi for a whiskey (neat) and put his eyes on the door. You could never be too careful around here.

"I wouldn’t worry too much,” she said at length. “Strangely enough, people leave me alone around here.”

He took a long, slow sip of his whiskey. “Now that _can’t_ be due to the officially-sanctioned, _highly_ popular trade agreement between the Initiative and the Collective. Not at all.” He savored the small, knowing smile that crept over her face. “I think it’s the six bar fights you’ve won in the last, what, seven months? Umi appreciates the entertainment. Don’t you, Umi?”

The bartender was shuffling clean glassware onto the rack as she wiped at the same stubborn dark spot on the counter that she had been wiping for the last fifteen minutes. She sighed wearily. “Pathfinder paid for all the broken chairs, that’s all I care about.”

“See? She appreciates it.”

Ryder downed the remainder of her whiskey in one go and gently set the glass on the counter. For a long while she was quiet, her eyes distant, lost in whatever thought had been eating away at her since she'd walked in the door. 

Finally she slid the glass over to Umi along with a handful of credit chits for good measure. Her voice was low and tired when she said, “Can we talk in private?”

* * *

“Here we are,” Reyes proclaimed, sweeping one arm in a grand gesture encompassing the whole of the dingy apartment. The lights flickered on a moment later, although they didn’t do much to illuminate the space. “Home sweet home.”

Ryder stepped inside and stopped, blinking in the dim light after the bright sunshine of the outdoors. Reyes’ personal apartment was little more than a single-room squat in an area of the slums called The Stacks, a collection of residential prefabs that were less constructed and more haphazardly piled on top of each other. Getting home if you lived here could mean anything from picking a lock to climbing a rickety ladder to navigating a complex, deadly obstacle course up a tower of buildings taller than the mountain beside it. It was perfect, as long as you were fit, reckless to a fault, and depressingly isolationist.

“It’s...nice,” she said, in a tone that implied she didn’t think it was all that nice. He couldn’t exactly disagree—the floor paneling was peeling, the roof leaked during every flash thunderstorm, half the lights were broken, dirty clothing and food wrappers were piled in dark corners. Being near the top of a stack, the whole thing tended to sway gently whenever the wind picked up, which meant it swayed all the time.

Still, it was all the home he needed.

“Ha! You flatter me,” he said, furtively kicking a discarded pair of pants out of sight. “But really, I don’t have much of a reason to clean up. The only person who’s ever been up here is me...and now you.”

"Really? Nobody? That's…."

Reyes thought she would finish with something like _nice_ or _sweet_ , but instead she walked around the creaking floor with obvious interest, peering at every bauble she happened to notice on the sagging shelves. One was a sleek model of a starship, poised on its base as though just breaking orbit. Ryder stopped moving and stared at it, one finger gently brushing the polished edge of its wing.

The scale-model ship had been a gift from some aunt or cousin years ago, back when he'd passed all his pilot exams and received his first license to fly. It followed him through every short-lived job, every temporary home, and every family upheaval. No matter how bad things got, it was a reminder of how far he'd come, and that there was always something to hope for. Even now, if he needed a reminder of all he'd gained—the stakes he played at nowadays—he could look over and see the miniature _Normandy_ on a table by his bed. It was the culmination of an impossible alliance and unprecedented technological discovery, a spectacle, the pride of an entire galaxy. What wouldn't he give to have that life himself, to beat all the odds and be a spectacle? To be somebody’s pride?

So the way she looked at it was a little unnerving: respectful, almost reverent, like she was afraid to break it but couldn't keep her hands away. It was dangerously close to the way she looked at _him_ sometimes, and that thought wrapped around his lungs and squeezed.

He put his hand on her waist just to hear her surprised squeak. "So," he asked, stepping closer and draping his other arm over her shoulder. "What is it you wanted to talk about? In private?"

He'd been contemplating a thousand possible answers to that question since they left the bar. All the clues were there: the unanswered emails, the drop-in visit, her reticent silence and obvious discomfort. The solution was obvious, but he hesitated just before he reached it. He didn’t _want_ to prepare for the worst.

So when, after a long pause, she said, “I missed you,” he exhaled. So it was that simple.

He said, “I miss you too.”

Sara’s ordinarily shy, reserved smile slowly grew wider and wider, until a thousand-watt grin beamed out at him, so bright her face was transformed entirely. _That_ smile was something even he saw only rarely, and he felt a little lighter knowing that it was directed at him. Then it shifted into something sly, narrow and cocky and almost definitely dangerous.

"Take my clothes off," she said.

Reyes had never _enjoyed_ following orders, but her commanding tone had him moving in lockstep. Her charcoal-gray sweatshirt came easily, lifted over her head and folded neatly on the edge of the mattress. The shirt, a thin henley with the top button undone, was next. She propped her feet up on the bed one at a time to let him unlace and remove her boots, then she shimmied out of her pants and kicked them aside. The clasp of her bra was a puzzle he already knew how to solve.

"You're so thoughtful," she said. She was so close, her breath tickled his cheeks, soft and hot. Only a moment ago she’d been quiet, pensive; now her posture was ramrod straight, and her eyes demanded his undivided attention. He could feel the muscles in her thighs twitching nervously, see the creeping flush darkening her neck and ears, hear her quickening breath. One of her hands danced along the curve of his jawline and tilted his chin up until their noses touched. "But when are you going to stop being so damn gentle with me?"

It was short work to close the gap and press an open-mouthed kiss against her lips. She yielded eagerly, tangling her fingers in his hair and taking his bottom lip into her mouth. She pressed against him with so much force that the backs of his knees hit the bed, and he fell onto the mattress, digging his fingers into her skin so that she fell with him. When he flicked his tongue on the ridge of her teeth and she sighed with pleasure, he burned. When she bit down, he groaned.

He'd thought about this moment over and over for months, thought about what he would do with the person he—well, wanted—in his private sanctum. Wine and dine. Undress. Seduce. He’d been so lost in the fantasy of it that he hadn't even gotten to the _after_ part. He was realizing now that he'd do anything to have this again, and keep having it. He'd walk the straight and narrow. He'd give up the Collective and light Kadara Port on fire. He’d crawl back to the Initiative and ask _how high_ when they told him to jump. _Anything_. He was starting to believe that if she led him to Hell itself, he'd follow...if only for the incredible view from the rear.

One of Sara's hands was snaking under his shirt already, skimming the maze of cuts and scars on his belly and side to tug on his nipple. Pleasure like hot sparks raced across his skin. His hips bucked and she moaned, low and guttural and loud enough to rattle the fucking windows.

"Wait,” he gasped, as she rolled her hips in kind, leaning back and dragging her nails in a fiery line down the front of his chest. “Wait, let me…I’m not doing this with my pants around my ankles like a horny schoolboy.”

There was a brief tangle while he lifted his hips and shucked his remaining clothes to the floor. She was impatient, quivering on her knees above him while she fingered the waistline of her own underwear. He put his hands over hers and slid her panties down, deliberately slowly, enjoying the quaver of her frustrated whine.

"This," he said, touching the handle of a slender knife sheathed at her thigh. It was twisted and brutal-looking, a kett design. A last resort. "Keep this on. It's sexy."

"Don't tell me what to do." But she was smiling again and she didn't take off the knife.

For a long moment all he could do was stare. Reyes had seen the propaganda posters that circulated the extranet in the years before the Initiative launched; everybody had. He'd also seen the much smaller number of _new_ posters that had been hastily created in the wake of Alec Ryder's sudden death. Most of them featured the new human Pathfinder in an authoritative pose, looking at the viewer head-on with expectant eyes and a smooth, airbrushed face, accompanied by pithy slogans. _Join the outposts. You are essential. Help us fight for our new home!_ Every detail was carefully manicured to be as pleasing as possible: the brown hair, the slender waist, the undarkened eyes and unmarked skin. The only imperfection they'd decided to keep was a jagged red scar running down the side of her nose—a mark of her military service, and unspoken proof that she was strong enough to be their savior.

Looking at her now, he knew every ounce of it was bullshit.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer."

She was sitting back on her heels looking at him too, that impatient quirk of her mouth softening the longer he stayed silent. She'd asked him that night, on the rooftops above Kadara's streets while they waited for Sloane to get bored and make trouble:

_How do you do it?_

_Do what?_ he'd asked.

_Act all cool and confident all the time. How do you always know what you're doing?_

His first instinct had been to come up with some outrageous lie, something truly impressive, but nothing he thought of sounded good enough. The longer he waited, thinking desperately, the more earnest she looked, cheeks flushed with whiskey, the smell of sweat cooling in the evening air. He was still thinking about the way she'd kissed him in that storage closet, yanking him down by the collar and clutching his waist like she meant it. Eventually he'd decided on the truth.

_Fake it 'til you make it. Just act like you know what you're doing and people will listen. If you're smart, you'll get it right anyway._

She had laughed. _Reyes, that sounds exactly like something a bullshitter would say._

_It's not bullshit, though. It's bullshitting in a way that you're actually right._

_That makes no sense._

_You asked._

That was when he'd decided to tell her everything.

"You're beautiful."

She stilled, her fingers just on the verge of his thigh and dangerously close to where he lay painfully hard. "Isn't that the kind of thing you say afterward? When we're all sweaty and glowing and stuff?"

"It's true now."

Her eyes flickered, and for a moment, he was afraid she'd changed her mind and would order him to put all his clothes back on. Instead, she wordlessly wrapped her fingers around him and slid herself down—wet, warm, tipping her head back at the sensation.

Nothing existed except the heat of her around him. At every point of contact—hips, thighs, fingers—he felt a live-wire current electrifying him. Reyes watched fixedly as her chest rose and fell with her breath.

And then she _moved_.

Languid, slow, almost lazy, her hips rolling with the purposeful ease of the tide. It should have counted as torture...but he found himself settling into the rhythm, some instinct pressing him down and making him wait. Or no, that was her hand, splayed on his chest like an anchor while the other fisted in the sheet by his head. It might as well have been an iron anvil, the way he could hardly breathe against its weight.

"Sara…" he begged. He didn't know what he was asking for.

The wind picked up and the entire apartment shuddered, making them both gasp, half-fearful and half-thrilled. "Reyes," Sara breathed. She didn’t say anything else, only whispered his name again between small, faint moans.

Reyes felt intoxicated, strung out, dizzy with need. Sweat slicked the front of his chest and the dip in the small of her back where his fingernails dug for purchase. His heart was an engine out of control, roaring in his ears, pounding wildly between the bars of his ribcage. Sara’s eyes, half-lidded and hazy, drifted to his, black pupils wide with desire. She lifted her hand and touched the dry middle of his bottom lip with one finger, just as she'd done with the model ship earlier.

Something came undone inside him. Like a dam breaking, he felt abruptly wildly out of control. He quickened his pace, and her arms were beginning to shake as she followed suit, gripping the sheets with both hands as though she’d fly into orbit if she let go. The perfect angle was suddenly no longer deep enough, her body now too far away. His hands were numb and his thighs ached. Everything was spinning, spinning—the bed beneath him, the ceiling above them, the stars around them.

"Don’t stop touching me," she was saying, rocking in time with the brutal rhythm, her skin flushed and damp. Her voice was a wreck. "God, more, please." His ears were filled with the sound of her gasping, like a prayer he couldn't help but answer, again and again and again: _please. Please. Please. Plea—_

She came with a scream, and he followed soon after.

* * *

**“Mr. Vidal.”**

  
  
An unfamiliar voice startled him awake. **“Mr. Vidal, please wake up. Sara is in distress."**

Reyes jolted upright and tossed the blankets away, skin prickling instantly in the cold night air. Sara was curled on her side, tangled in the sheets and, he thought, fast asleep. In the dim moonlight streaming through the one high, narrow window, he could see the sheen of sweat that coated her skin despite the chill. She was trembling. It was quiet enough at this hour—it had to be midnight, at least—that he could hear her faint, whimpering breath.

"Sara," he whispered, putting his palm on the side of her neck, feeling her racing pulse. Then he ran his hand down her shoulder and arm, leaning closer to her ear. "Sara, love, wake up."

For a few agonizing moments nothing happened. Then she exploded awake, gasping, arms windmilling and tangling the sheets further as she struggled to sit up. She cried out and her hands flailed blindly; Reyes missed being hit by only a few inches.

"Hey! Settle down, it's me! That's it, shh…." 

Slowly, painfully slowly, her breathing evened out and she relaxed back into the bed. "What…" She put a hand to her bitten, bloody lip and grimaced. “Shit.”

“Shit,” he agreed. He rolled onto his side and ran a thumb through the sheen of sweat on her brow. As she closed her eyes to the touch, he cupped her cheek and tilted his head so their noses were touching. “Are you okay?”

Sara shuddered, a movement halfway between a tremor and a sob that wracked her whole body. Reyes felt the beginning of tears burning behind his eyes. “No,” she murmured, sounding exhausted, _defeated_. “No, not really.”

He shuffled even closer. “Tell me.”

She was quiet for so long, her eyes shut, he thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again. Then, her voice barely above a whisper: “Reyes, I...I died.”

His heart stopped beating. “What?”

  
  
“We had caught a lead on Meridian’s location,” she started, words tumbling out in a rush. “Coordinates, for the kett flagship. It was parked out in the Tefano system—middle of nowhere. With the salarian ark.”

If Reyes hadn’t already been lying down, he would have collapsed from the wave of dizziness that washed over him. The entire salarian ark held captive by the kett…. “Jesus,” he swore. “Christ.”

Sara took a deep, shaky breath before continuing. “Our sabotage mission got a lot more complicated then. Suddenly I had a whole species to extract. And their Pathfinder…." She swallowed hard. "There was a krogan squad on board. Kettified. Drack wants my head on a pike for leaving them. But Raeka….I couldn't sacrifice her to save them. I just couldn't."

Words spun and spun in Reyes' head, all of them inadequate. The way she described the decision made it seem completely impossible. He imagined her pinned down in the belly of a dark warship, taking heavy gunfire and watching big tanks full of krogan turn into goo while salarians fell one by one, cut down by vengeful kett. Some disembodied voice would be laughing, he was sure, oozing with self-satisfaction as the net tightened and tightened and tightened. For the sake of a single lost planet that he wasn’t even sure existed.

"It...it gets worse," she whispered. Her eyes were screwed shut and she seemed to want to disappear into the sheets, her shoulders bunching defensively. It set off a knot of anxiety in his gut; how could it possibly get worse? "The whole thing was a trap. We set off some kind of stasis field in one of the corridors, and it was like...like gravity hadn’t even been working until then. Couldn’t move, could barely breathe. And the Archon….” Sara made a noise like a choked sob. “He barely seemed interested. He said he was going to figure out what made me _special_ —” she spit the word— “and then throw us away. Said we’d be his prisoners until we died.

“He didn’t stick around to watch it happen—I guess he’s not the gloating type. There wasn’t any override to the stasis field. SAM still has trouble with kett encryptions, and we didn’t have that kind of time. So we...exploited a loophole.”

Reyes didn’t know his hands were shaking until she gripped his fingers with hers, knuckles white. He quickly tucked one hand under the pillow for warmth and pressed her knuckles to his mouth. The apartment shuddered in the breeze, and they both jerked in surprise as the bed rocked and a few baubles clattered to the floor. With a single high-pitched whine, the heating unit propped in the corner sparked once, coughed, and powered down, plunging them into eerie silence.

Silence was worse than any nightmare, so Reyes said, “I’m not going to like this loophole, am I?”

Sara didn't answer right away. In the dark he could barely make out the shape of her curled on her side on the mattress. She _was_ breathing, shallow and fast and shuddering; he pulled her knuckles to his mouth again in a silent plea.

“The stasis field was keyed to vital signs. No heartbeat, no field. So SAM...stopped my heart. And I escaped.”

She began to cry.

Reyes’ heart pounded in a jittering panic. Inter-pirate politics, he knew. Even the most violent and dramatic of contraband skirmishes, he could handle. But a crying girlfriend? Was so beyond the realm of normal that his brain failed to produce any useful course of action whatsoever. The part of his head that gave him all the right words to say in all the right ways was failing entirely. So he settled for tucking her head into his chest and wrapping his arm around her shoulder and hoping it would be enough.

Eventually, she settled enough to suck a few deep, ragged breaths and rub her nose on a handful of the bed linens. It was quiet again for a long time.

“Stay here with me,” he said suddenly, and he felt Sara jerk in surprise. His thoughts churned. “I mean it. You spend all your waking moments risking your neck, and for what? Bureaucrats who had your replacement lined up the moment you left orbit. I think you’d like the Collective life. And I...I miss you.”

She shook her head slowly—even before he’d asked, he’d known what her answer would be. “I’m not doing this for the Initiative. I’m doing this for the people who didn’t ask to wake up into another war. When the kett are gone...when we can just live peacefully. Then I’ll stop. Okay?” She raised up and planted a gentle, chaste kiss on his lips, then settled back down.

“I’m supposed to report in at 0600,” she admitted, fidgeting with drawing the blanket tighter around them both. Reyes balked: 0600 was a few short hours away. “More details about the rescue. Planning the Initiative’s next moves. _Et cetera_.” Sara pronounced the phrase with such gravitas that Reyes felt warm and prideful. She shrugged half-heartedly and yawned. “Gil took the QEC down for maintenance instead, said Drack needed a mindless outlet for his aggression and Kadara was the perfect excuse. Tempest is grounded til tomorrow afternoon.”

“Remind me to send Gil flowers,” said Reyes, only half joking. Instead of a response, there was only the sound of her soft breathing, asleep at last.

**Author's Note:**

> "file created may 29 2020" :[]  
> anyway happy new year


End file.
